The assassination approval process is John Kiriakou’s answer to the question of how easily the CIA could arrange the death of a foreign head of state. His answer is that it is “a lot harder than most people would expect.”[1]
What changed
“It’s not the ’60s or the early ’70s anymore, where the CIA is a completely renegade organization and it just goes around overthrowing governments and assassinating world leaders. Now there actually is at least some congressional oversight.”[1]
The lawyers
What makes it slow is not the operation but the sign-off. “There’s a bureaucratic process by which they would have to go through, and it’s quite difficult — because it’s not just the CIA coming up with an idea and then going to the president to approve the idea. There are layers and layers of attorneys, in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, and the National Security Council’s Office of Legal Affairs, and the CIA’s General Counsel’s Office. And so you have this army of attorneys that has to approve it before it even gets to the president for his signature.”[2]
The cheaper alternative
Kiriakou’s practical conclusion, applied to Nicolás Maduro: “it would be easier — it would be more legal — to put so much pressure on Maduro that he opts to just get up and run, than it would be to try to kill him.”[2]
He contrasts the official machinery with the freelance version, which he treats as farce: “in just the last year or so there have been a dozen, a dozen and a half mercenaries that have sort of washed up on shore and have said ‘hey, we’re here to overthrow Maduro’ — only to be then arrested and traded back to the United States for Venezuelan prisoners. It’s kind of silly.”[3]